461–467 of 467 posts
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So you keep 70% of electricity piped from Morocco to the UK. That sounds bloody swell. I'd pay for that in a heart beat.
The oceans kill it completely, remember two oceans of 100km reduce transfer by 0.75, and thats ignoring all the other problems with the grids on the way.
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Transmission and storage are not just political and financial problems, except in the sense that you can technically frame any problem as being them.
They are though - we know how to build high capacity transmission, we know how to build complex dispatch control systems, we know how to build energy storage. All we need is the money and factories and brains and hands to build a lot more of them. All that requires is powerful entities to decide it's important - i.e. politics.
Either way this is a category error. Tesla needs those things and used venture capital. A correct thought would be: governments are one way to do this.
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Heat pumps change this a bit, doubling the efficiency (assuming its similar to Sweden), but it varies. So in the ideal case, its roughly the same, in practice slightly less, and with costs it gets complicated and dominated by subsidies and existing infrastructure. Heat pumps require nearby reservoirs however, land essentially, which is available in suburbs, but can be quite a challenge in dense cities. But the real p…
How is it similar to Sweden, when Sweden is colder?
Temperature in sweden averages about 2 degrees C, and the temperature in germany about 3 degrees C, which can look like a 50% increase, but everything in thermodynamics works in Kelvin, not C. So the difference is between 275 and 276 degrees K, which is about 0.3% or almost nothing.
Its not enough to prove anything, just make it reasonably likely, which is then combined with the qualifier.
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That wasn't theoretical installed base, it was actual power produced.
> That wasn't theoretical installed base, it was actual power produced That's not what I'm saying. On a windy day, then doubling your number of wind turbines will (roughly) double your power output. But if there's no wind, your output drops to zero. Contrast that with nuclear power, where doubling capacity doubles output always. So with nuclear power you could say that based on what current output we have, if we buil…
I'd agree with that. Have you considered adopting a good policy instead?
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> That wasn't theoretical installed base, it was actual power produced That's not what I'm saying. On a windy day, then doubling your number of wind turbines will (roughly) double your power output. But if there's no wind, your output drops to zero. Contrast that with nuclear power, where doubling capacity doubles output always. So with nuclear power you could say that based on what current output we have, if we buil…
So, you're saying that if we adopt a stupid wind policy, bad things will happen? I'd agree with that. Have you considered adopting a good policy instead?
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> Germany intends to take all coal-fired generation offline by 2038 Good if they actually mean it maybe? > leading to a likely increase in renewable-power assets in the long term... Yet in the short term, coal is helping to bridge the supply gap. This just seems asinine. But what do I know... Is there something impassably / chronically dangerous about nuclear power or is it just public fear that pushes us away from i…
Not only is it solvable, it's basically been solved for years. https://youtu.be/c1QmB5bW_WQ is aimed at the lay audience. The issue is that radiation is a silent killer, so it is extremely easy people with vested interests in (say) fossil fuels to exploit our inability to access risk. Coal hurts people every single day, but it doesn't have the same poetic weight as radiation so this is lost on the general public. Nuc…
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Sure, but again the example was washing clothes, and clothes dryers use a LOT of energy. Holy crap, doing the math a US style dryer would cost ~1.50 in electricity in Germany to dry one load of clothing. Sources: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_price... https://www.thespruce.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-an-el... So, like, you know, yeah. My dryer has a delay start function on it, if late ni…
Most people in Germany do not have an electric dryer. Also, electricity prices are not the same everywhere. My parents for example pay only 20 ct/kwh (I have no idea how they got that contract, especially since they moved only last year. They have low overall usage though (2,000 kWh/a, with fixed cost being like 30% of the total bill)